On the morning of Sunday 27 September, it seemed the North stood on the brink of the abyss.
As the Orange Order was gearing up for a march down the Garvaghy Road, loyalists gathered in Portadown city centre to welcome them. Thousands of residents from the mainly nationalist area, meanwhile, linked arms to blockade the sectarian parade from marching through their street.
The ghosts of Drumcree had returned.
This latest standoff was the inevitable result of a ruling by the Parades Commission late on Friday evening, allowing the Orange Order to march down the Garvaghy Road for the first time in 28 years.
After a frantic exchange of injunctions and counter-injunctions that continued into the early hours of Sunday morning, the court eventually ruled in favour of an Orange Order parade of 35 people, due to begin at 8.00am.
For residents, this would have been an insult and a humiliation – a repeat of the so-called ‘Victory March’ of 1995 – as well as an affront to the memory of the many victims of the standoffs of the 1990s. The ruling provoked an immediate mobilisation.
Three times the Orangemen attempted to parade down Drumcree Hill on Sunday, and three times they were sent packing. Further attempts were made on Monday and Tuesday, with the same result. For now, at least, the parade has been prevented from going ahead – a partial but important victory.
The standoff however remains, and tensions are running high in Portadown, with schools remaining closed on Monday. And what is more, the political fallout from Drumcree has only just begun.
The past
The recent history of Drumcree goes back to the 1980s, when the parade, originally going through the ‘tunnel’, was rerouted along the Garvaghy Road. By the 1990s, new housing developments had transformed the area into majority nationalist. Residents therefore organised in the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition (GRRC) and mobilised to oppose the sectarian march, leading to a major standoff in 1995.
These were crucial years in the so-called peace process. The Provos had called a ceasefire the year before, and negotiations that would eventually lead to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement were under way.
In this context, Drumcree became a focal point for the most extreme wings of loyalism and unionism to opportunistically shore up their support and oppose any concession – no matter how mild – towards nationalists.
Many a loyalist career was made on the hill of Drumcree. Billy ‘King Rat’ Wright – who would go on to found the LVF after being expelled from the UVF for breaking the ceasefire in Drumcree – was among those bastards stoking up tensions for their own benefit, as would Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair of the UDA later on.
The 1995 standoff resulted in the so-called ‘Victory March’, with Orangemen being led down the Gravaghy Road by Ian Paisley and David Trimble, who infamously celebrated by clasping their hands together in the air – in open contempt to the nationalist residents of the area. Riding the Drumcree tide, David Trimble would go on to take over as leader of the UUP just weeks later.
1995 was followed by years of standoffs, battles with the RUC, riots, rising tensions and loyalist violence in the Portadown area. Every year around the Twelfth celebrations, nationalist residents were subjected to a reign of terror and fear.
Dozens were killed, including Michael McGoldrick, a Catholic taxi driver murdered by the UVF under Wright’s command; Robert Hamill, beaten to death in Portadown town centre while the RUC stood by and watched; the Quinn brothers – three young boys, aged nine, ten and eleven – killed in a UVF firebomb attack; and Rosemary Nelson, a legal representative of the GRRC, murdered by the LVF.
It was against the backdrop of the tensions surrounding Drumcree that the Parades Commission was established in April 1998, just as the Good Friday Agreement was being signed.
The idea behind the body was to take the RUC and the Secretary of State out of the line of fire when it came to ‘contentious’ – read: Orange sectarian – parades. In the spirit of the GFA, ‘mediation’ between the two communities was supposed to ease tensions and produce a good and wonderful solution for everyone.
Needless to say, when the Parades Commission banned the Orangemen from marching down the Garvaghy Road in 1998, loyalism reacted by mobilising. Paramilitaries unleashed a wave of violence that culminated in the murder of the Quinn brothers.
By 1998 however, workers and youth across the North had grown sick to the stomach of the sectarian violence of the Troubles. While the GFA appeared to promise a way out of the impasse, loyalist violence repulsed workers and youth from traditionally Protestant backgrounds. By 2001, the most extreme and violent wings of loyalism were isolated – and Drumcree had become relatively calm.
But, as with everything else in the North, what the so-called peace process did was not fundamentally resolve the underlying issues, but merely pack the tensions on ice, freezing them for a time.
Eventually, it was all bound to re-emerge.
The present
For 28 years, the Orange Order applied to march down the Garvaghy Road, and for 28 years its applications were rejected by the Parades Commission. Then everything escalated very quickly after the Belfast High Court quashed the latest marching ban in August.
This was based on a technicality. Apparently the ladies and gentlemen of the Parades Commission – on as much as £50,000 a year for one day of work per week – did not even bother properly signing off the documents relating to their ruling.
But the quashing of the ban was followed by a deafening campaign from the entire unionist establishment, calling on the Commission to resign. When one commissioner did resign, the Portadown District of the Orange Order doubled down, stating: “Put simply it’s one down, more to go.” Sensing weakness, they seized the opportunity to apply for a new parade for Sunday 27 September.
All of a sudden, opportunist unionist politicians and loyalists of every shade crawled out of the woodwork. DUP MLA for Upper Bann Carla Lockhart – infamous for having stood side by side with a mob of masked loyalists in Scarva earlier this year – TUV leader Jim Allister, and prominent loyalist Jamie Bryson all appeared in court to defend the “human rights” – no less! – of the Orange Order to carry out a sectarian march with a murderous history. DUP leader Gavin Robinson, meanwhile, described the ruling as an historic “breakthrough for Portadown District and the wider unionist community”.
It is obvious what these opportunists are trying to achieve.
28 years on from the GFA, the North lies in tatters. Political unionism has nothing to offer to working-class communities – Protestant or otherwise. In fact, together with the British imperialists, they bear a good chunk of the responsibility for the state of the place today.
The Good Friday Agreement: A quarter century of dashed hopes
Just to mention a few recent examples. The DUP has blocked Stormont from passing this year’s budget, meaning that an already dilapidated public sector will now have to operate with just 95 percent of the budget it received last year – which was already scarce, to say the least. They are also blocking the Good Jobs Bill, in a frontal attack against the working class. Not to mention the fact that the Department of Education – run by the DUP – has just thrown hundreds of applications for school repairs in the bin.
Then there is Lough Neagh. The spiralling cost-of-living crisis. The healthcare system. In fact, the whole infrastructure is crumbling. The streets of Newry were quite literally flooded with feces over the weekend after the sewer system overflowed.
On top of all this, the DUP is dealing with the fallout from the incarceration of its former leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, for child rape. For the first time in more than five years, the latest opinion polls have not put them ahead of the other unionist parties. At the next election, they therefore risk suffering a significant blow.
What could be more convenient for them, then, than to distract from all of this and shift the ‘debate’ away from their very material failures and towards the “human rights” of the Orangemen? That is, while they are responsible for the crisis ravaging the working class, they are attempting to present themselves as the only defenders of the ‘rights’ of the unionist community. This is, after all, the role that sectarian culture wars have always played in the North.
The TUV and ‘activists’ like Bryson, in the meantime, are trying to present themselves as more determined ‘fighters’ than the DUP – again, in an attempt to shore up support for themselves. In Stormont on Tuesday, TUV MLA Timothy Gaston attacked the DUP for not bringing the Executive down, before concluding with: “No parade, no Stormont and no surrender!”
Implicit in the logic of the situation is therefore an escalation of the sectarian rhetoric from political unionism and loyalism. If, in the process, they inflame tensions and risk destroying whatever relative calm existed in Drumcree – terrorising old women, men and children alike with the prospect of a return to the 1990s – what does it matter to these opportunists?
It was in this context that – under pressure, in what was described as its “most scrutinised ruling in a decade” – the Parades Commission ruled in favour of the Orange Order on Friday night.
This is what led to the standoff on Sunday. This is what put PSNI lines in riot gear as the only thing standing between a crowd of Orangemen and loyalists on one side and thousands of nationalists on the other – scenes not witnessed on the Garvaghy Road for more than two decades.
The future
At the time of writing, the standoff is still ongoing. A reduced contingent of Orangemen remains on top of the hill and regularly approaches the police line to demand their ‘right’ to parade. The Garvaghy Road residents remain in the street and are organising for the long haul.
On Monday, the Secretary of State met with the spokesperson of the residents’ association, the Orange Order and political parties, but no resolution came out of the meetings. “Frustrated”, this Labour colonial viceroy released a statement warning that the standoff would hurt “investment” opportunities in the North – to hell with the fears of the residents! This came just before he explained that he would not let “mob rule” win – again, the mob being old women, men and children from the Garvaghy Road who do not want a return to the regime of terror and fear to which they were subjected in the 1990s.
In the meantime, political unionism and the Orange Order are putting pressure on the British government and the PSNI to uphold the “rule of law” – i.e. to violently move against the residents and force the parade through. And later, to move in and arrest the protest leaders.
For now, however, a stalemate prevails. And it is difficult to say what comes next.
Needless to say, communists stand resolutely on the side of nationalist workers and youth who have been treated as second-class citizens in their own home for more than a century now. A victory of the Orange Order would embolden everything reactionary in society.
But even in the event of a victory for the residents, this is unfortunately far from the end of the story.
On Sunday morning, Michelle O’Neill stated that re-emergence of the Drumcree dispute “brings into question how this whole peace process works”. This is easily the understatement of the year.
The Parades Commission ruling will likely have further implications all over the Six Counties. What will happen in Drumcree next 12 July? Will Orangemen be allowed to march again? Will the standoff return as a regular occurrence?
And what about other Orange Lodges in and around parades which have been rerouted? Are they going to launch fresh, new appeals as well? The precedent that has been set is dangerous to say the least.
One of the cornerstones of the so-called peace process was precisely that ‘contentious’ issues could be solved through power-sharing and so-called neutral bodies – the Parades Commission, the courts, etc. But when it came to it, it was not the courts, but mobilisation in the streets – a show of strength (and weakness) on the two sides – that has once again proved decisive on Sunday.
It is no coincidence that Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald arrived on the Garvaghy Road to be met with chants of “Bring it Down!” and “Fuck Stormont”. The events will have left a lasting impact on the consciousness of workers and youth from nationalist areas, in whose eyes Stormont was already discredited. In other words, another one of the rocks on which the GFA stands has tumbled down the Garvaghy Road on Sunday.
Stormont came back on Monday to a game of recriminations, with the DUP directing its fire at Sinn Féin. The only goal here is the Stormont election in 7 months’ time. That is, if the Executive was paralyzed for the last 2 years – if nothing of any substance came out of power-sharing during that period – workers and youth in the Six Counties can confidently expect even less now.
On the nationalist side, it is worth noticing how the mobilisations against Orange sectarian marches in the 1990s were, on many occasions, led on the ground by Sinn Féin. This time around, Sinn Féin leaders only showed up later in the day, having focused all their effort on the Parliamentary and constitutional games in Stormont.
The deafening sectarian chorus coming from the unionist side is likely to push Sinn Féin’s latest disappointing performances at the opinion polls slightly up. But this will not be reflected into a renewed enthusiasm for the party.
The problem for Sinn Féin is that the crisis of the peace-process is also their crisis, as it exposes the dead end of the strategy they have pursued over the last decades. No doubt many nationalist workers and youth will be looking at their future after Drumcree with a sense of anxiety. The key lesson they will learn from the events is to organise, and take their own matters in their own hands – not to place their hopes in Sinn Féin’s electoral advances.
Finally, the events in Drumcree should act as a wake up call for revolutionaries all over Ireland. What a stark reminder that all the tensions and contradictions that led to the explosions of the Troubles have not gone away, but are lingering unsolved beneath the surface. One small accident – one missing signature on a piece of paper – and suddenly the abyss appears close.
At the height of the standoff on Sunday, it would have not taken much for the situation to escalate. A reckless decision by the PSNI to move in by force. A firework thrown in the wrong direction. A victim. And the situation could have escalated beyond control. Anxiety was thick in the air of Portadown.
It is true that this time around the reactionaries were only able to gather the support of one hundred or so to their cause. It is true that nobody, except an insignificant minority, wants a return to the violence of the Troubles. But so it was true in the period leading up to the Troubles.
If a solution to the problems affecting workers and youth across the sectarian divide in the Six Counties is not found, events might eventually take on a logic of their own. The point is that the only solution can be provided by a socialist programme able to unite the most advanced layers of workers in a militant fight against capitalism, imperialism – and with it, partition and sectarianism.
As the crisis felt by workers and youth intensifies, the possibilities to build an organisation capable of carrying out such a fight are growing by the day. But so are the forces of sectarian reaction.
That is why our tasks are so pressing.
Originally posted on communism.ie – the website of the RCI in Ireland.
